When without delay means when you're ready

April 10 2002

There is something contrived about Bush's demands on Israel. Analysis by Gay Alcorn in Washington.

Look, we mean it. We really mean it. OK, this time we really, really mean it.

There was something comical about George Bush's furrowed brow as he stabbed the air and said that when he told Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw his troops from Palestinian-controlled areas - a demand first made last Thursday, then again on Saturday, when he added "without delay" - the leader of the free world expected to be heeded.

"I meant what I said to the Prime Minster of Israel," he insisted on Monday. "I expect there to be withdrawal without delay."

Mr Bush sounded like a hapless parent who had lost control of an unruly child and whose increasingly shrill demands have less and less impact. Dragged into the Middle East quagmire, Mr Bush has said that he, like former president Bill Clinton, is determined to be a peacemaker.

But he is discovering that toppling the ill-equipped Taliban in Afghanistan was always going to be the easy part of his post-September 11 presidency.");document.write("

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Now, there are hard choices to be made. Telling the warhorse Ariel Sharon what to do - the same Sharon who has defied American admonitions since the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s - was always going to test Mr Bush's newfound mantle of foreign policy supremo.

His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, on the first day of his near-impossible mission to the region to exact a ceasefire and move Palestinians and Israelis towards talking to each other again, said Israel's announcement that it would begin withdrawing from the cities of Qalqilya and Tulkarm - a token gesture because the military has already finished sweeping for extremists and their weapons there - was "encouraging" but not good enough.

"Let us hope that this is not a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but the beginning of a pullback," Mr Powell said.

Mr Sharon continued to avoid a direct response to Mr Bush, telling the Israeli Knesset that the pullout would occur "as quickly as possible when the mission is completed".

Yet there is something contrived about all of this. Mr Bush's "enough is enough" speech last week was relatively even handed - he spoke of the unsustainability of Israeli occupation of Palestinian areas and the daily humiliation of Palestinian civilians. It was designed in part to soothe the fury of friendly Arab countries, but it was still a clearly pro-Israel speech.

For reasons ranging from deep empathy for Israelis facing nihilistic terror to the considerable power of the Jewish-American lobby in the US, there is no room for moral relativism in the White House.

There is a sense in America and Israel that there is a bit of "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" going on about what Mr Bush actually means when he says Israel must pull back from its 11-day offensive "without delay" after the President's previous "understanding" of Israel's need to defend itself.

The Administration has given multiple hints that there is a grace period. "A military mobilisation of this kind and operation of this size cannot be undone in moments," the National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, said on weekend television.

Mr Powell was asked in a Sunday interview whether Israel was being "insubordinate" to the US. "Oh please," Mr Powell groaned. America was Israel's "very best friend in the world", and Mr Powell "hoped" Mr Bush's "request" would not be ignored.

Israelis seem to think that the offensive to destroy Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure" has a little more time to run.

The Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, told US television: "I don't think he [Bush] meant exactly to say, 'Just get out'." But the President said "without delay", replied the incredulous interviewer. "Yes, but I don't think he meant that," said Mr Ben-Eliezer.